Two sides of technology — The Social Dilemma
I always believe that there are always two sides to everything — good, bad, nice, awful, positive, negative. Some things won’t always be good or bad. It also applies to technology and social media.
It’s inevitable that technology has a lot of positive impacts. Starting from collecting donations, connecting a long-lost friend or family, to finding a research journal for our school project.
Other than that, it’s impossible for us to order food from our phone without technology. Now, thanks to technology, it takes less than 15 minutes and a few taps for us to invest.
Technology makes our life easier and simpler, right?
But, IS IT?
I’m pretty sure that you guys are familiar with The Social Dilemma, one of the prominent documentaries from Netflix. It’s basically about how technology and social media harms all of us. There are a lot of former employees in key positions from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, speaking up about how massive problem have occurred because of social media.
What is the documentary about?
The Social Dilemma tells us how tech industries design something that make people addicted and how they are competing to get our attention. If you see it more clearly, you’ll know that most social media have similar features. For example, Snapchat has it first before the Instastories and then WhatsApp has WhatsApp story, and now, twitter has fleets.
They use features which have three main goals — engagement, growth, and advertising. This caught my attention because now i realize the meaning of Instagram and Twitter nonsense push-up notifications.
So recently i was reducing the usage of my Instagram and Twitter main account. It’s ridiculous that they keep sending me a notification which recommends me to my following (someone i barely know) new updates (which is not something that i need). Not just that, Instagram sends me a notification about someone’s new story or updates. It drew me to the conclusion that the longer you don’t use it, the more often they send you nonsense notifications to engage you so you won’t leave it.
I saw that a lot of people complain about being watched because their Instagram advertises the product they talk about with someone through their phone. Creepy? No, we ARE (being watched). The Social Dilemma explains to us how our activity on the internet is being recorded and watched so they can display the content according to our preferences. Advertisement is their source of funds. As long as we use Instagram for free, there is nothing we can do to prevent the advertisement to poops up. Not just Instagram, i think Facebook did it first.
The movie also illustrates a family experiencing problems due to social media. Isla, the third child, is suffering from low self-esteem and she doesn’t really care about what her mother said. She just focused on her phone, scrolling and posting. She posts filtered photos on an app and hopes it gets a lot of likes from her peers. When she realizes that she doesn’t get many likes, she deletes the post. It reminds me about the old me.
I cared a lot about the likes on my post. Everyone’s recognition or validation was everything for me. When i didn’t get many likes i expected, i felt bad for myself and started thinking that I’m not good enough. But, I’m getting better and i realized that it means nothing. This is one of the negative effects of social media. There are people affected because of this likes-features.
Do you know that people behind Facebook create “like” button to spread positivity among others? It’s not something that was created on purpose to hurt someone because they don’t get enough likes. But, we, human can’t predict the future and it already caused people (especially young teenager) suffer from mental health problems — low self-esteem, negative body image, depression, loneliness, and suicidal.
Another thing that interests me is the story of Ben, the second child, who is affected by dangerous online conspiracy theories and political issues. The movie represents this situation with Ben being directed by the similar recommendation post on social media. He couldn’t stop seeing that and he begins to believe what he sees on social media. He even joined the protest that ended up putting him in danger.
It’s crazy how social media can control someone, or even the population. It reminds me of something that happened in Myanmar (violence broke out in Rakhine state between the Buddhist majority and minority Rohingya Muslims). UN human rights investigators said that viral hate speech by extremist and anti-Muslim monk on Facebook is considered as one of the causes this riot happened.
“If you want to control the population of your country, there has never been a tool as effective as Facebook” — Tristan Harris
When COVID-19 outbreak started, do you remember that we were inundated by a lot of invalid news (from Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, etc) such as we can get the virus by eating a Chinese food, 5G conspiracies theories, all deaths are being labeled as COVID-19, etc. Till now, i still can see a lot of people are affected by that.
Now we know that technology and social media harm us. Not just an individual but also all over the country.
What can we do to cure it?
At the end of the movie, the interviewees said that it’s absolutely impossible to delete Google, Facebook, Instagram, or anything. We can’t just delete it and expect that the situation will turn around as it has in the past. Also, no one predicts about this huge negative effect.
I agree with almost everything in this movie. I agree that technology and social media have a lot of negative impacts and it’s our duty to be aware of it and make sure that we or our loved ones won’t be affected negatively by that.
All we can do now is educate and build awareness of our closest environment. We should stop feeling hesitant to remind and approach vulnerable people. Like, we can start by turning off the notification when we’re not stable and start reminding our closest one to re-check the information they got from the internet.
My review and opinion about The Social Dilemma
Indeed, it’s a really good movie. I always love this kind of movie. From 1–10 i give it 8. I’m fascinated by the interview with the former key position of prominent social media but the drama…. meh. It’s not my cup of tea. Too dramatic and unrealistic. It feels… flat. If there is no drama and just plain documentary, i guess i would give 9 of 10.
You should watch it. Don’t mind the drama, the documentary is nice tho! It contains a lot of good insight so we can be aware about what we did in social media. Remember, never follow the recommendation on Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter, hahaha!
